Melanie Heath in Exploring Masculinities: Identity, Inequality, Continuity and Change, edited
by CJ Pascoe and Tristan Bridges. Oxford: Oxford University Press A “crisis of masculinity”
has erupted in every period of backlash in the last century, a faithful quiet companion to the
loudly voiced call for a “return to femininity.” In the late 1800s, a blizzard of literature
decrying the “soft male” rolled off the presses.“The whole generation is womanized,” Henry
James's protagonist Basil Ransom lamented in The Bostonian.“The masculine tone is …